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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

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Did you know that the average person's life in the Stone Age was no worse then that of the average 17th century Briton? That given their more varied nutrition and lesser workload, the lives of hunter gatherers were superior to both? That the Black Death caused a major improvement in European standards of livings during the 14th to 16th centuries? That the institutional conditions for economic growth, as normally understood, were better in the Middle Ages then they are today?

These are only few of the mind blowing and well documented claims put forward in Gregory Clark's breathtaking - there is no other word - "A Farewell to Alms". Clark confronts the greatest mystery of human history - why did the West leap forward, breaking away from millennia of stasis, to create the modern, industrial world? Clark not only refutes most of the common wisdom about the rise of the West, but also brings forth an astonishing array of data in support of a radically new interpretation. No doubt some specialists would disagree with Clark's conclusions; I have my doubts, too - but Clark's methodology, his thoroughness, and the rigorous manner in which he addresses a huge quantity of data makes "A Farewell to Alms" an instant classic and a model for all economic history.

Clark describes world economic history as essentially a two-phase story. The first phase, from the dawn of time to the Industrial Revolution, featured a barely changing world governed by the cold and remorseless laws of Malthus and Darwin. But those same laws brought on a slow revolution, and a new phenomenon was emerging - first in Europe, and slower in India, China and Japan - Economic Man.

Reverend and Economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was the first to thus describe the world economy: in his model, people's wages were equal to the subsistence level; whenever wages increased, population increased, and pushed wages back to subsistence. Therefore, Clark argues, throughout history population was at equilibrium - whenever new technology increased productivity, the result was not higher living conditions, but higher population. Thus the difference in living conditions between times and places were caused by such effects as the different in hygiene level (improvements in hygiene ironically pushed down living standards by allowing people to survive on meager wages) and death by war and pestilence (which, equally ironically, pushed up wages).

And then, in the 18th century, in a relatively small island nation, everything changed. The Industrial Revolution transformed the world, or at least England, Europe, the US, Australia, Japan and nowadays China and South East Asia. Mankind broke free of the Malthusian trap. Productivity growth rose in two orders of magnitude; Productivity gains no longer led only to population increases, but also to increase in the standards of living. The West today is rich beyond the wildest dreams of its 17th century ancestors.

What happened? Most explanations suggest that Western Institutions were somehow improving: Markets were becoming freer, property rights more secure, the legal system more efficient, etc. Perhaps technology led returns on investment in human capital to increase

Not so, says Clark. Markets were much less regulated in pre modern times then they are today. Property rights, in England at least, more secure. And the return on human capital - as measured, for example, in the difference between the wages of master artisans and simple workers - decreased or stayed unchanged.

Furthermore, during the Industrial Revolution, hard work didn't pay; Inventors and Innovators repeatedly failed to reap the fruits of their inventions. Despite the gigantic leap in textile productivity, hardly anyone became really rich from textiles. Competition and knowledge leaks drove prices down, and the benefits were the consumer's, not the manufacturers'.

What changed, Clark argues, is not the environment in which the economic actors operated. The actors themselves were no longer the same.

In a Malthusian world, population was at equilibrium: barring efficiency growth, it did not increase. But while failing to increase, it was nonetheless very dynamic: a Darwinian struggle for survival, in which the Rich had many offspring, and the poor few. Thus, Clark suggests, through a combination to cultural transfers and Darwinian selection, the population changed. Upper class qualities spread to lower classes; Society was becoming Middle Class; Economic Man was born.

Or shall we say, selected?

As evidence, Clark sites several changes that did happen between 1000-1750: The Rise of Literacy, the Fall of Interpersonal Violence, the lengthening of working hours and the decrease in the time preference of money, which meant that people learned to postpone satisfaction. "Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work [became] values for communities that... [had been] spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving." (p.166)

The reason this process happened first in Europe and not in China or India, Clark argues, is because Europe was the most Darwinian. In other societies, the difference in birth rate between rich and poor was not as dramatic.

Clark's book is both exciting and troubling. Because it argues that the difference between the rich and poor nations is not in the way they organize their economies but in Cultural and likely genetic differences, it challenges both the right wing belief in the superiority of free markets, and the left wing faith in the equality of mankind. As a believer in both, I am troubled.

I don't think Clark's book is complete: If the differences between Modern and Pre Modern people are genetic, they should be discoverable in our DNA. If they are cultural, the mechanism of cultural transmission should be explored. And Clark doesn't say anything about democracy - is it a coincidence that democracy flourished side by side with the economy?

"A Farewell to Alms" is hands down the best book I read all year, and one of the best books on history, economics, or sociology I know. It is everything I look for in non-fiction - smart and elegantly written, challenging and illuminating, and grounded in both theory and empirical data. This one's for the ages.

The perennial question asked by economic historians is why some countries grow excedingly rich and others remain miserably poor. It is a question that writers of "big history" have asked: notably Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (Bantam Classics), David S Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, and Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. These works rely heavily on theory beyond the mere retelling of certain facts and events. It is in this tradition that Gregory Clark, economic historian at the University of California at Davis, presents the economic history of the the world. The underlying theory that informs his version is that social and possibly biological evolution explains economic growth. The specter of social darwinism haunts his imagination.

For Clark the critical stage of social evolution is when a society is able to emerge from the Malthusian trap of poverty. It is at this point where they diverge from the pack and actually experience social progress and economic growth.

Regarding the Malthusian trap, Clark argues that the well-being of the average person around 1800 was no better than the average hunter-gatherer 10,000 years earlier. According to Malthus' "Essay on the Principle of Population," with every technological advance that increases the efficiency of production, there is a corresponding increase in population, thus neutralizing any gains made in production. In short, there are just more mouths to feed. The principle being that the population only grows as fast as the food supply.

That was the case until the Industrial Revolution. After 1800, something happened in England that caused production to outpace population growth. It was the first time in history that a society actually escaped from the Malthusian trap. For the first time incomes and consumption per capita began to rise. To find out why this occurred, Clark undertook a study of wills in England going back hundreds of years. He discovered that the rich had twice as many offspring as the poor, thus they outpopulated the poor. The rich brought with them certain skills and behaviors such as literacy, numeracy, work discipline, deferral of gratification, etc., that eventually permeated the rest of society in a downwardly mobile fashion. This is truely an original hypothesis. It was this evolutinary shift, according to Clark, that triggered the Industrial Revolution and set England apart from other countries

Why did England take off and others did not? Why the Great Divergence? The phrase is taken from Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. which deals with the same subject. Clark asks why the gap between rich and poor countries went from 4:1 in 1800 to 50:1 today. His answer is that in countries such as China and Japan the rich did not produce enough offspring to spread their productive behaviors downward through the rest of the population. East Asian and other economies were not able to push their agarian economies out of the Malthusian trap.

The title of this book is a pun on the title of a Hemingway novel, suggesting that alms or aid to the poor will do them no good. Clark is in the camp of those who believe that a change in behavior or, in this case, an advancement in the evolutionary process will allow poor countries to emerge from poverty. The implications of this are very controversial, to say the least, and still very inconclusive. Nevertheless, it is an interesting explanation of economic history that will be debated for years to come.

For most of human history, material living standards have been static. Over the last century or two, large parts of the world have broken away from this equilibrium and enjoyed massive increases in income. Gregory Clark sets himself to answer three big questions: Why did living standards stagnate for so long? What allowed England to be the first country to break the trap? And why were some countries able to follow and surpass the leader while others have become even worse off?

His answer to the first question is Malthus's: any increase in living standards was, over a period of generations, eaten up by an increasing population facing diminishing returns in. Thus the labouring Englishman (or woman) of 1800 was, in terms of stature, diet and leisure, worse off than a Stone Age hunter-gatherer, or indeed his counterpart of 1400 who benefited from the shortage of workers following the Black Death. The many advances in productive technology that occurred before that time merely served to increase population. While this is an old argument, it is illustrated with a wealth of historical data on population and living standards, and a simple graphical model which illustrates starkly the inversion of economic vice and virtue in this world: war and disease raise incomes while peace and hygiene lower them. Thus "Europeans were lucky to be a filthy people who squatted happily above their own feces".

How did England escape? Clark argues that the usual explanations are all unsatisfactory. Invoking the Enlightenment, Protestant Reformation or Scientific Revolution merely pushes the question back one stage, even if the link is valid. The timing of changes in family size and the skill premium does not fit human capital based explanations, while it is hard to find evidence of any institutional changes at the crucial time. Intellectual property was still very poorly protected (many of the great textile inventors died in poverty) while the other elements of a market-based economy had been in place for centuries. Indeed Clark argues that, by many measures, medieval England had better economic incentives than England today - lower taxes, inflation and government debt, a higher skill premium, and fewer restrictions on land use. The Industrial Revolution saw a massive increase in the supply of innovations without any apparent change in incentives.

There were, however, four crucial changes over this time. Interest rates fell from double to single digits. Literacy rose. Society became much less violent. And work became longer and more disciplined. This environment rewarded middle-class values of patience, diligence, acquisitiveness and self control. Clark suggests that these values were in fact being biologically selected for: the rich had more surviving children than the poor, and their children inherited their values, whether by genetic or cultural mechanisms. It was the long-run evolutionary change in the character of the people, rather than any short-run change in policies or institutions, that did the trick. This has the merit of focusing of differences between England, on the one hand, and Asia on the other: while Japan, China and India did have many of the same market institutions, they still had higher interest rates and lower literacy. What data is available for China and Japan also suggest that the rich enjoyed a much smaller reproductive advantage in those countries, perhaps linked to the fact that their populations quadrupled or quintupled between 1300 and 1750, while England barely recovered its losses from the plague.

This leads naturally to the third question: why the Great Divergence? Poor countries, especially colonies had "the cheapest labor in the world; security of property; complete freedom to import technicians, machinery, capital . . . sea routes; and access to the largest market in the world." This sounds like an optimistic list of China's advantages ten or twenty years ago. Why were the results not similar?

Clark's answer is labour quality. Using mainly evidence from the textile industry, he argues that low-wage countries had much higher labour-output ratios (as would be expected given relative prices), but not lower capital-output ratios. They had to use more workers on the same machines to get the same output, even with imported technicians and managers. This would only be rational if the low wage workers were intrinsically less efficient: less diligent, less punctual and less disciplined; and there are plenty of recorded complaints along those lines. Thus investing in low-wage countries was not particularly profitable, and there was no tendency for incomes to converge. Indeed, since modern medicine has reduced mortality at any given level of income, we can have societies such as the poorest in sub-Saharan Africa, in which the population continues to grow despite the lowest living standards anywhere in recorded history.

England had the Industrial Revolution because of natural selection, and poor counties are poor because their workers are intrinsically less productive. This is a bold pair of hypotheses, which would no doubt attract vociferous condemnation even if backed by watertight evidence and presented in the most modest and unassuming way. This they emphatically are not. Confining our attention to substance rather than style, the evidence is thin on crucial points, and could bear other interpretations. On the question of inheritance of productive characteristics, rather than simply cash and connections, there is only an unreferenced and unadorned statement that rich fathers tended to have rich sons even when the inheritances were made insignificant by large families. There is also no attempt to show that the theory is quantitatively consistent with the observed selection pressure of income and plausible values of inheritability. The textile productivity data could be explained by efficiency wages, or climate, or the employment of assertive, unruly men rather than docile, obedient girls. [Edit: there is actually quite a big literature on this.]

At a broader level, it seems natural to link natural selection and labour quality, thus turning the two theories into one. However, this sits uneasily with the variability of growth in individual countries across time, as Clark admits: "Regarding the underlying cause of the differences in labour quality, there is no satisfactory theory. Economies seem . . . to alternate more or less randomly between relatively energetic phases and periods of somnolence." Clark also mentions the huge increase in earnings enjoyed by workers moving from the Third World to the First, without seeming to notice the obvious problem this poses for the labor quality theory.

But if the natural selection theory, on the admission of its author, is a poor explanation for variation in labour quality across countries and time, it seems doubly poor as an explanation for the Industrial Revolution in England. If this is viewed, as Clark does, as an upsurge in the supply of innovation without any change in demand, the connection with bourgeois values seems rather weak. Even if these values are inherited and selected for, it is hard to see how patience, workaholism, and pacifism lead automatically to innovation. One could even argue that they would crush it or crowd it out. And since innovators in the pre- and early industrial era typically received meager rewards, selection directly on innovation is even less plausible. One could perhaps make a case for selection on literacy reaching a critical point that allowed communication of ideas and thus continuous, sustained innovation, but then we are back in the world of the discontinuous, one-off Enlightenment/Revolution/Revolution theories that Clark abhors.

Perhaps, however, this is where we should be. After all, the Industrial Revolution was a one-off, discontinuous historic event. (The demographic transition to lower, deliberately controlled fertility that allows final escape from the Malthusian trap is not, but existing theories seem to explain this pretty well, and Clark adds little or nothing.) We can increase our understanding of this event by careful study of the place and time where it happened, and places and times where it didn't, but until we invent a time machine to move between parallel universes there will always be a bit of mystery remaining.

Even if the answers are unsatisfactory, however, the questions remain. And A Farewell to Alms does a great job of posing the questions. It also contains many insights on the timing, composition, demographics and beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution. This book deserves everything it gets, both in praise and in blame.

Originally published in Agenda 15(3), 2008.

This book is absolutely amazing, on a par with Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.

The industrial revolution allowed England to escape what has been called the Malthusian Trap--a condition common to every pre-industrial society. In the Malthusian Trap, any recognizeable gain in wealth by a society would result in a slight increase in population. As the population would rise, however, living standards would go down, and the death rate would go up. For this reason, population growth remained at a glacial pace of 0.005% for thousands of years. Then the industrial revolution happened. For the first time, population and prospertiy could increase in lockstep, trending ever upwards over long periods of time.

By why did this happen in some places and not in others? Despite its many benefits, why has it proven to be so difficult to export the industrial model to other areas of the world? These are but a few of the questions that Clark addresses in his original and thought provoking book.

What I have taken away from this book is that a lot of good will and human effort has been wasted by not taking in to account the significant differences that exist between people and cultures. We falsely assume that the fruits of industrialization are so obviously desirable that other peoples should do whatever they have to do to make the necessary adaptations to reap its rewards. But we are largely ignorant of why this can't so easily be done. The industrial revolution came to be within the context of a certain unique culture, and it makes sense that it could not be easily duplicated among other people with different values and ways of life.

In attempting to explain the differences in wealth between one population and the next, Clark's approach is cultural. But here's the key: these cultural differences were shaped by selective pressures experienced by some peoples and not others. The conditions which gave rise to the industrialization of England were not present among other populations and are not even to this day. That is why it has proven to be be so difficult to duplicate elsewhere. His arguments in support of this thesis are clear, persuasive, original and rigorous. This book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the monumental importantance of economic and cultural differences between cultures. The questions he raises adds a new dimension to ones perspective. I predict that at some point, when discussing solutions to the poverty which billions still confront, you will not be able to post a good argument without also being familiar with his.

Clark says he spent 20 years writing this. I believe it. Despite frequent
amusing anecdotes, this is not a fun read. Clark is an academic who has hammered together what may be decades of project notes, charts, tables and yes, you know it is an academic writing when there are 24 pages of references and a bonus technical appendix.

His five main conclusions are: 1)mankind in 1800 was no better off than the caveman 100,000 years earlier, 2)since 1800, the unskilled worker has been the major beneficiary of the potentially stunning fruits of the industrial/technology revolution, 3) modern production techniques demand workers who exhibit discipline, hard work, meticulous attention to task completion, patience,literacy, thrift, prudence, 4)handouts of money to developing diverging countries where workers have poor attitudes are wasted(i.e. wasted "Alms"), 5)happiness does not depend upon absolute well being.

I like all the data he has, especially the trove from England 1200-1870,
and can use some of it in my Megatrend research, but will the average reader wade through the numbers and charts? I strongly disagree with his comment on page 289 that demography is unimportant in the U.S. and UK because of reductions in fertility. My research suggests that the reduction in fertility in the U.S. and most industrialized nations is leading to negative economic consequences that will rival an asteroid hit. Maybe the birthrate at UC-Davis is still OK?

Why Clark gets into the "happiness" issue is not clear? After he has demonstrated that good work ethic people are well rewarded with enormous per capita income, he bursts our balloon with the notion that it won't make you happy, unless you have more than your next door neighbor. For a more useful definition of happiness, Gregory should check out the research papers from the University of Chicago's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, or see his book "Flow" published in 1990.

Gregory Clark is not the first, nor will he be the last, to compile demographic data about medieval and early modern Europe. The fact that the rich had more surviving children than the poor in most pre-modern societies is about as controversial a proposition to an historical demographer as the sun rising in the east is to an astronomer. What he does with this flash of the mundane, is preposterous.

First, even assuming his Darwinian hypothesis is correct, it is a ridiculous assumption to posit that thrift, hard work, and non-violence were upper class traits in medieval Britain. The nobility, if anything, was a warrior class based on institutionalized violence. Apart from warring and managing its estates, it was essentially a leisure class and a shockingly illiterate one at that. If it transmitted behavior through its genes, then we would expect a society made up of indolent, violent, over-consumers, not thrifty savers.


Second, while I don't doubt Clark's English data, his comparison to other cultures is just wrong. Throughout its history, China had far greater social mobility than any European society -- from cracked rice bowl back to cracked rice bowl in three generations as the Chinese proverb has it. It had an institutionalized meritocratic mechanism for social advancement in its imperial examination system -- one dependent on hyper-literacy which required long hours and years of dedication in order to achieve success. Without participation in this system, furthermore, downward mobility was assured -- China didn't have primogeniture and large estates tended to fragment over time. Continued membership in the gentry depended on the talent and hard work required by the examination system. If genetic transmission of upper class values was the catalyst for modernization, this is the society where it should have happened first, not in warlike, class bound England.

Third, in most pre-modern societies, including China, upper economic families tended to have more surviving children than poorer families. Clark needs to show me some evidence that the differential in England was so much greater than the differential in other countries that the genetic composition of the population would have changed significantly faster. In any case, mathematical demographic models show that if you go back far enough (the 8th century I believe), every one of us has at least one common ancestor. Given this and the power of endogamy, this effect, if indeed there is one, should have been in evidence far earlier than 1800.

The problem here is one that seems to be endemic to economics as a discipline. Like Marx, the modern academic economist sees history and society as measured by a single criterion - material goods. In these world views, virtue is measured by what you have not what you do. If you have it, ipso facto, you must have been entitled to it. That being the case, a writer such as Clark discovers anew a truism that has been known for years in other social science disciplines and, ignoring 50 or more years of theorizing and exegesis, proceeds to invent his own explanation of this astonishing "new" fact. It's as if someone discovered on his own that atoms consisted of particles and produced a Newtonian explanation -- ignoring more than 80 years of quantum physics.

In any case, in an age of rising inequality is it surprising that someone would reinvent the theory that the rich deserve what they get because of their superior genes? Look where that theory led during the last century.

Walter Battaglia is correct in pointing out that Prof. Clark's claims about genetic change are not supported within his book or anywhere else. Besides, as Bearymore points out, it is "a ridiculous assumption to posit that thrift, hard work, and non-violence were upper class traits." It was the aristocratic traditions themselves that held back the people of England and made the progress in freedom stretch over eight centuries from the Magna Carta to the broadening of the electorates just in the past couple hundred years.

This curious attempt to attribute the unique economic progress of the West to "better genes" is just as unbelievable as its predecessor from the PU Press Series on Economic History of the Western World by Kenneth Pomerantz, "The Great Divergence." In the latter book, the author declared England and China were on a par in 1850 when a lucky discovery of coal in England tipped the balance and led to the expansion of the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. In Izaak VanGaalen's review, he correctly observed that such works rely heavily on theory that extends beyond the mere retelling of certain facts and events. Reviewer Bearymore is more concise, calling Clark's genetic theory "preposterous."

Clark' positions are more solid when he argues that an extended period of stability and security were requisite to the development of sound economies. And he is correct that such stability when combined with a citizenry embracing thrift and hard work often led to prosperity. These observations allow him to correctly avoid Jared Diamond's very questionable conclusion that natural endowments and geography were all important. All three scholars attempt the ultimate mission impossible of trying to shoehorn in a theory of divergence based on a single reason and occurring at a single point in time. Those that claim the 1850 date or the Industrial revolution as the turning point miss the many more critical points of the preceding millennia, all of which went the West's way. The world supremacy of the West had been demonstrated a couple centuries earlier with the discovery and development of the American continents.

The antecedents of the Industrial Revolution and eventual Western supremacy was a multi-step process: Without even looking back to the Judeo- Greco-Roman contributions, the hand-writing was on the wall with the development of Western universities in the 12th century, the establishment of Renaissance Republics with limited central power, the widespread application of the printing press in the 16thC, the indomitable call for freedom consonant with the Reformation in the 16thC, and most notably the transfer of world leadership to the United States in the 18thC.

The major fault with these three attempts at recapping the Western advance to freedom and prosperity is that they try to narrow the causes to one or two simplistic issues such as geography, climate, the English gentry's genes, the discover of a mother lode of coal, and the milking of colonies. None of those factors were determinant, nor could they be. Three thousand years ago there were over ten civilizations on this planet that had good geography, reasonable climates, and large established and secure national structures--and yet they all remained relatively stagnant except for one. The "outcome" may have been in doubt until 500 to 1,000 years ago, but never since that time. When Al Ghazali turned the Islamic nations inward in the 11th C, and when the Chinese grounded Admiral Cheng-Ho's fleet in the 15th C, those cultures never recovered, and Decline set in. The oppression from the top denied their people the freedom to exercise their genius and innovative skills.

Anyone interested in the way Western people were able to reach supremacy should read Wayne Te Brake's book "Shaping History." He details how between 1500 and 1700 the "ordinary people" carved out the advances in freedom that revolutionized politics in Europe. He gives considerable detail on how the 16thC citizens within the Swiss confederacies and the United Netherlands built on the independent spirit of the Reformation to overthrow not only their high priests, but their lay leaders as well. It is impossible to trace the divergences that led to Western supremacy without looking at the role played by Luther, Calvin, and Knox in establishing that both priests and kings derived their authority from the people.

In "Common Genius" I have traced how it was the happy occurrence of economic freedom and open societies in a few isolated locales sprinkled within European history that demonstrated the inevitable superiority of free people. Julian Simon's book, "The Ultimate Resource," posits that it was the free citizenry of a nation that created growth by overcoming shortages and creating goods. This principle was evidenced more often than not in the worst geographical spots--the swamps of Venice, the tidelands of Holland, the mountains of the Basques, the off-shore islands of the Phoenicians, and the northern coastal cities of the Hanseatic League. Such locales, undesired by surrounding empires, allowed periods of stability, free of aristocracies and oppressive clergies, where the common people could, in Prof. Te Brake's term, "shape history." These locales were the only places in the world where common artisans could become entrepreneurs and they led the way. Centuries later Adam Smith tried to summarize what they had done and laissez-faire economics allowed the Industrial revolution to unfold. Prof. Clark's thesis about upper crust genes is undermined by the persistence of those elites in maintaining the inefficiencies and injustices of mercantilism. It took the efforts of countless illegals, smugglers and entrepreneurs (commoners all) to topple that oppressive form of central government regulations. Clark's idea about thrift and hard work as valid contributors to progress is correct but their source was not the English gentry but came up from the bottom and dated back to the merchants in Florence, the "sea beggars" in Holland, and many of the persecuted sects that sprang from the Protestant Reformation. Reviewer Bearymore is fully justified in objecting to today's academic assertions that luck, genes or climate made the difference and in calling such theories preposterous! Bill Greene (real name)

Since the sixteenth century the scholarly community in the West has accepted the existence of scientific laws. Over the past four centuries modern science has been preoccupied with the discovery and practical application of these laws. This has revolutionized both the natural sciences and human civilization. While the humanities have also made progress during this time, their results have been less remarkable. They have been unable to account for the forces underlying the changing fortunes of human society. The book by Gregory Clark is another heroic attempt to discover the laws underlying the course of human history.

In 1930 Corrado Gini published his Harris Foundation lecture: "The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population". Gini understood much of the wheel of history, but made - because of the lack of empirical data - the wrong assumption, that the well-to-do have always fewer children than the poor. Indeed, such is the situation since the last quarter of the nineteenth century until up to today. For theoretical reasons Oded Galor and Moav Omer in their seminal paper "Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth" (2002) came to the conclusion that before 1850 the upper and medium stratum of society must have been more surviving children than the poor. Clark could confirm this assumption with empirical data of his own, and he makes this finding to the cornerstone of his theoretical derivations.

It is a pity that neither Galor and Moav nor Clark are aware of a large body of historical data, supporting their fundamental assumptions and claims. For example, in 1990 a preliminary summary on the "Social and Demographic Originis of the European Proletariat" was published in which we can read: "The data show that rural and urban proletarians are formed from the socially downward mobile sons and daughters and grandchildren of peasants." Despite Clark's staying of one sabbatical year at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin, he does not cite any German source. In the Inventory of the German Central Office for Genealogy. Part IV (second edition, 1998, ISBN 3-7686-2099-9), he could find not only a complete bibliography of historical demography of Central Europe, based on local family reconstitutions, but also an exhaustive review (p. 74-176) of studies of differential fertility supporting his core argument. Clark could strengthen his point immediately, if he were able to read original papers and books in French, Dutch, German and Swedish, because the development in West, Central and Northern Europe was in principle the same as in England. - By the way, Ernst Engel undertook not studies of Prussian but of Saxonian working-class budgets.

Nevertheless, Clark wrote a couragous book of high originality, enriched with a large number of very interesting figures and tables, touching with their overall message the borderline of political incorrectness. But he should have better nothing written about the last decades. The last two chapters of his book are extraordinarily weak.

Despite his awareness (Table 14.4) of a general negative relationship between the number of surviving children and the social status of their parents in the modern world - the so-called demographic-economic paradox - in sharp contrast to the preindustrial world, where more children of the rich survive, Clark does not dare to draw any conclusion from this. For example, as Francis Galton became aware of this paradox, he founded the eugenic movement. Clark, too, understands the centuries where larger numbers of children in the households of the rich survived also as a process of a genetic enrichment of the cognitive basis of society. Could be the turning point (in England already about 1850, in Germany three or four decades later) in differential fertility also be the turning point of the cycle of industrialized society? Could it be, that the rich because of their rising social density would be the first to regulate their numbers in a cyclic fashion? What does or could this mean for the Aristotelian cycle of political constitutions, for the future of democracy? What are the differences and the similarities of the industrialized society with the rise and fall of the Roman empire and the repeated cycles within China?

"Why Isn't the Whole Word Developed?" is the caption of last chapter of this book. In agreement with his overall message and insight Clark could maybe find a contribution to the answer in the books by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality as well as in the most recent papers by Heiner Rindermann, Erich Weede and Garett Jones. Seen from this point of view Clark has written the first part of a new world history. To imagine and to write the second part should not be an impossibility. However, it will also be a dangerous look into our future.
Most important in this respect is the article "The Population Cycle Drives Human History ... ", published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies (Number Fall 2007).

Physical scientists are able to observe the natural world more objectively, because the observer is not identical to the observed. Science is not a potential battlefield for the survival of the individual scientist, as history is for the historian. This is the root cause for the failure of the human sciences to generate any laws governing history. I am sure, anyone who discovers such a general law or even the dynamics of the cycle of population and constitutions of the global industrialized society will be doomed to drain the hemlock cup to the dregs as Socrates.

This book provides very interesting descriptions of the Malthusian era, and a surprising explanation of how parts of the world escaped Malthusian conditions starting around 1800. The process involved centuries of wealthier people outreproducing the poor, and passing on traits/culture which were better adapted to modern living. This process almost certainly made some contribution to the industrial revolution, but I can't find a plausible way to guess the magnitude of the contribution. Clark is not the kind of author I trust to evaluate that magnitude.
His arguments against other explanations of the industrial revolution are unconvincing. His criticisms of institutional explanations imply at most that those explanations are incomplete. But combining those explanations with a normal belief that knowledge/technology matters produces a model against which his criticisms are ineffective.
He makes interesting claims about how differently we should think about the effects in Malthusian world of phenomena that would be obviously bad today. E.g. he thinks the black plague had good long-term effects. He made me rethink those effects, but he only convinced me that the effects weren't as bad as commonly believed. His confidence that they were good depends on some unlikely quantitative assumptions about benefits of increased income per capita, and he seems oblivious to the numerous problems with evaluating these assumptions. His comments in the last few pages of the book about how little average happiness has changed over time leads me to doubt that his beliefs are consistent on this subject.
While many parts of the book appear at first glance to be painting a very unpleasant picture of the Malthusian era, he ends up concluding it wasn't a particularly bad era, and he describes people as being farther from starvation than Robert Fogel indicates in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100. Their ability to reach somewhat different conclusions by looking at different sets of evidence implies that there's more uncertainty than they admit.
He does a neat job of pointing out that economists have often overstated the comparative advantage argument against concerns that labor will be replaced by machines: horses were a clear example of laborers who suffered massive unemployment a century ago when the value of their labor dropped below the cost of their food.

Despite the punning title, this is a serious and thoughtful attempt to present large scale overview of economic history. Clark deals with 3 major topics - the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial economy, the industrial revolution, and the great divergence of economic performance between the industrialized core and the non-industrialized periphery. Of these sections, the first, dealing with the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial world, is the best. This is perhaps because Clark has done extensive research on pre-industrial England. Clark has a very nice series of discussions of pre-industrial economics and demography. This is essentially a description of the basic structure of economies stuck in the "Malthusian trap" in which living standards are reciprocally coupled to population. While Clark shows this to be probably true for all pre-industrial economies, he is not trying to fit all pre-industrial societies into one tight mold. The interaction between population and production tends towards a different equilibrium point for each given society. Clark argues that Europe, for example, was distinguished by relatively high mortality and relatively high living standards while China had lower adult mortality and probably equilibrated at a lower standard of living. A further point is that while Clark emphasizes the Malthusian trap as an equilibrium state, most human history actually takes place away from the equilibrium point. Clark is careful to point out that the pre-industrial world was not static. While change was slow, he points to 4 long-term important trends - declining real interest rates, increasing literacy and numeracy, rising work hours, and falling inter-personal violence. Clark argues these trends were crucial to the emergence of industrial economies. His model is interesting. He argues for the existence of a Darwinian process in which upper class individuals reproduced at a higher rate with downward mobility resulting in a diffusion of middle class values and/or genotypes throughout society. This is a melding of economic history and the French Annales school emphasis on long views of history and "mentalities" as important drivers of history. Clark's point is very interesting and argued well though a detailed examination of the argument reveals problems and his suggestion that this process involves genetic change is easily arguable. For example, it was European cities that emerged as the cockpits of the Industrial Revolution but given the incredibly high mortality rates within European towns and the constant replenishment of town populations from the countryside, Clark's downward mobility model doesn't seem to fit the facts. Some of the long term changes described by Clark, such as falling interest rates and declining interpersonal violence could have more to do with the emergence of more powerful states than the model Clark presents. As for genetic change, Clark is assuming uniform, constant, and intense selection pressure, which is unlikely.

In the second section, Clark discusses the Industrial Revolution. This section includes a short description of the Industrial Revolution and then Clark's analysis of why the Industrial Revolution occurred. Clark mentions briefly the important counterpart of the Industrial Revolution, the Demographic Transition, the drop in fertility that probably prevented the Industrial Revolution from becoming merely another Malthusian equilibrium shift. Clark has a nice, concise discussion of prior theories of the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Like a number of other recent economic historians, he is quite critical of the institutionalist explanation, which sees the Industrial Revolution as the result of the development of Smithian economic/political institutions. Clark's explanation of the Industrial Revolution is an extension of his view of the long term changes in the Malthusian world. Clark is arguing that Smithian people as opposed to Smithian institutions were the crucial factor in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. In Clark's model, China and Japan were proceeding along the same path as Europe and given time, an Industrial Revolution would have occurred in one of those nations eventually. This is arguable in several ways. Any monocausal theory is likely to be wrong. Even if we concede the reality of Clark's model of longterm change, its insufficient to account for the Industrial Revolution. As Clark points out, the Industrial economy required consistent technological innovation at a fairly high level. This probably requires both a high rate of literacy/numeracy and a fairly widely diffused scientific world view. The relatively high rate of literacy in pre-modern Western Europe probably has less to do with Clark's Smithian process than the need of European governments and the Church for literate personnel, followed by the great boost to literacy provoked by the Reformation. Similarly, there is no evidence that China or Japan were on their way to something like the emergence of modern science. Clark's model suggests that an Industrial Revolution was inevitable somewhere. The alternative is to see the Industrial Revolution as the result of a series of fortunate coincidences. For a particularly good and concise presentation of this attractive alternative see the relevant chapter of the recent Power and Plenty.

The third section, on the Great Divergence, is the shortest and least satisfactory. Clark points out that the Great Divergence is not only the result of the increasing productivity of the industrialized core but also of impoverishment of the non-industrialized periphery. Clark argues that poor labor productivity is the key feature explaining the Great Divergence. I think Clark's discussion is to brief to be really useful. For example, he omits the relative deindustrialization of non-industrialized countries that followed the Industrial Revolution in Europe, a phenomenon pointed out first by W. Arthur Lewis some years ago.

Clark makes some additional good points. He points out that the institutionalist explanation for the Industrial Revolution is one of the principal supports for the neo-liberal model of development. But if the institutionalist model is wrong, then the neo-liberal model is likely to be wrong, a point with substantial practical significance. Clark also makes some very amusing comments about economics in general. His opinion is that economic theory is very good at explaining the equilibrium conditions of pre-industrial economies but not very good at explaining the innovative structure of modern economies.